Colton Haynes Speaks Out Against Homophobia in Hollywood

Fifteen months after he publicly came out of the closet, the actor opened up on Twitter Tuesday about losing jobs due to his sexual orientation. "Hollywood is so f--ked up," Haynes, who is engaged to florist Jeff Leatham, told his 1.96 million followers. "So much of the focus is on your personal life & has nothing to do with the talent you have to bring to the table."

Haynes, who rose to fame playing Jackson Whittemore on MTV's Teen Wolf and later Roy Harper on The CW's Arrow, will next appear as Detective Samuels in FX's American Horror Story: Cult. He' grateful to the creators of those shows—all openly gay men—for giving him work opportunities. "Thank god for RyanMurphy, Greg Berlanti, & Jeff Davis. They believe gay actors are more than just their personal lives," he tweeted. "So disappointed in how Hollywood cant understand that playing a character has nothing to do with how u live your personal life."

Hollywood is so fucked up. So much of the focus is on your personal life & has nothing to do with the talent you have to bring to the table

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Andy Mientus, best known for playing Kyle Bishop in the NBC series Smash, liked Haynes' tweets, telling him, "I'm afraid I know exactly what you're talking about. Be strong, brother."

In a 2016 Out profile, Haynes claimed his first manager dropped him for being gay and then advised him to post an ad on RentBoy.com to earn extra money—something he declined to do. He decided to affirm his sexual orientation in an Entertainment Weekly interview in the spring of 2016, he said, because he was tired of hiding who he was from the world. "When that happened, it was me figuring out, 'OK, is this a good move?'" he told The Huffington Post in June 2017. "I parted ways with my team, and it was a really tricky year for me. My anxiety was terrible, and eventually I was like, 'I'm not going to literally waste the last 10 years of my life.'"

"I've been told by so many people that you cannot be out and have a career. Literally people would set me up with girls for press," said Haynes, who was promoting Rough Night. For example, he said, "There was this whole story that ran with Lauren Conrad, who I love—she's the best. Basically my old manager at the time was like, 'Oh, take a picture with her.' He just basically ran this story trying to say that I was dating Lauren Conrad. It was there for about six months. I was like, 'Oh, great, I have to do this.' That's how it is in Hollywood. But not anymore. You have all these amazing show runners who actually embrace people's personal lives and embrace people's truth. I think that's really pivotal...I did that for seven or eight years. I was told by my first manager, like 10 years ago, 'You will never work in this town if people know.'"